Cross-talk in superconducting qubit lattices with tunable couplers – comparing transmon and fluxonium architectures

Cross-talk between qubits is one of the main challenges for scaling superconducting quantum processors. Here, we use the density-matrix renormalization-group to numerically analyze lattices of superconducting qubits from a perspective of many-body localization. Specifically, we compare different architectures that include tunable couplers designed to decouple qubits in the idle state, and calculate the residual ZZ interactions as well as the inverse participation ratio in the computational basis states. For transmon qubits outside of the straddling regime, the results confirm that tunable C-shunt flux couplers are significantly more efficient in mitigating the ZZ interactions than tunable transmons. A recently proposed fluxonium architecture with tunable transmon couplers is demonstrated to also maintain its strong suppression of the ZZ interactions in larger systems, while having a higher inverse participation ratio in the computational basis states than lattices of transmon qubits. Our results thus suggest that fluxonium architectures may feature lower cross talk than transmon lattices when designed to achieve similar gate speeds and fidelities.